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Instructional Video7:46
SciShow

Half of All Plants Are Invisible

12th - Higher Ed
If you see an acorn sprout under an oak tree, you're seeing that tree's grandchild. Here's why half of all higher plants are invisible, and why it works for them.
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Instructional Video10:50
SciShow

5 Animals That Have Bone Skin

12th - Higher Ed
From the long extinct Stegosaurus, to tiny modern mice, all sorts of animals grow bits of bones inside their skin. These structures are called osteoderms, and they're often more than just a suit of armor.
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Instructional Video5:16
SciShow

How Can Microbes Protect Crops From Drought?

12th - Higher Ed
Solving food shortages caused by droughts is a big challenge that may benefit from a tiny ally. Turns out that the microbes living in the soil around plants can give them a boost when water's scarce, which means more food for us, which...
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Instructional Video11:51
SciShow

You're Basically A Mushroom

12th - Higher Ed
The tree of life you learned in school is wrong, even if you just graduated. We like to sort eukaryotes into big kingdoms or supergroups, but scientists can't agree what those groups should be. Here's why that's a good thing.
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Instructional Video5:04
SciShow

Animals Have Grammar Too - A Little Birdie Told Us

12th - Higher Ed
If you hear birds chirping in the trees, you might not think much of the different sounds you're hearing. But as it turns out, those tweets and chirps have a lot more in common with some of our complicated rules of grammar than you might...
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Instructional Video5:43
SciShow

We Can't Find Most Of The World's Fungi

12th - Higher Ed
Most of the world’s fungi aren’t just rarely seen or found solely underground. They’re flat out invisible - and that’s becoming a big problem. Start your own microscopic journey with a Journey to the Microcosmos microscope:...
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Instructional Video13:38
SciShow

The Weight of “Nothing” Could Mean Everything (to Physics)

12th - Higher Ed
Deep in a Sardinian mine, researchers are constructing an experiment that hopes to solve what's known as The Worst Prediction In The History of Physics, and pin down the true identity of dark energy.
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Instructional Video5:46
SciShow

The 2000-Year-Old Farmers Saving the Amazon Today

12th - Higher Ed
Thousands of years ago, indigenous farmers in the Amazon created exceptionally fertile soil. Today, scientists think it could restore the succession of rainforest plants and help reverse the effects of climate change.
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Instructional Video7:09
SciShow

A Universal Cure for Snake Bites?

12th - Higher Ed
If you're bitten by a snake, you might need a horse to save your life. Researchers are searching for better antivenoms to treat illnesses like snake bite, and they're turning to monoclonal antibodies, made in a lab, to replace the...
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Instructional Video6:57
SciShow

The Rocket That Took Tortoises to the Moon

12th - Higher Ed
Months before Apollo 8 took humans around the Moon for the first time, two Russian tortoises (plus some other lunar tourists) had already made it back home. This was Zond 5 — the first mission to return to Earth after visiting another...
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Instructional Video5:50
SciShow

The Weird Reason More Bridges Are About to Fail

12th - Higher Ed
While they are incredible engineering marvels, we don't think about bridges all that much. But there's a good reason we should all be thinking about our bridges, since there's a weird reason that more of them might be at risk of failure...
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Instructional Video6:38
SciShow

The New Addiction Treatment We Found By Mistake

12th - Higher Ed
It's no secret that substance use disorders can wreak havoc on peoples' lives, so anything that we could do to mitigate those cravings and addictions is really important. Which is why it's such good news that research into drugs like...
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Instructional Video4:21
SciShow

The Science Of Fur Baby Talk

12th - Higher Ed
We've all gotten a little carried away with the baby talk at an animal that may not be a human baby. But there's a lot of research into exactly how much your sweet little fluffy-belly baby actually understands - and it's more than you...
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Instructional Video6:19
SciShow

Is The Orca Uprising Upon Us?

12th - Higher Ed
In 2023, a whole bunch of orcas started attacking boats off the coast of Spain. Was this the first battle in an all-out interspecies war? Well, probably not. But it's a pretty neat look into how trends come and go in orca pods - like...
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Instructional Video10:38
SciShow

The Earth's "Boring Billion" Years Were Anything But

12th - Higher Ed
About 1.8–0.8 billion ago, the Earth went through a period known as the Boring Billion, where not a lot changed in terms of geology, evolution, or even the number of hours in a day. Some scientists call it “the dullest period in Earth’s...
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Instructional Video5:29
SciShow

The Bizarre World Of Underwater Sneezing

12th - Higher Ed
For us terrestrial animals, sneezing is a regular part of life involving the movement of a lot of air. But animals that live underwater and don't breathe air like we do also sneeze. Sea sponges, corals, and hagfish use their snot to...
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Instructional Video5:30
SciShow

We’re Wrong About How Mountains Form

12th - Higher Ed
We think we know how mountains form. Plate tectonics causes rock to be pushed up at fault boundaries. Except that model is hard to prove, and a new study suggests it might actually be a lot more complicated.
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Instructional Video12:38
SciShow

How To Make The Best Coffee, According To Science

12th - Higher Ed
If you drink coffee, you might wonder if you're doing the most to make your absolute best cup of coffee. And fortunately for you, science has the answers, from getting the perfect grind to finding out the best beans for you. So pull up a...
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Instructional Video6:56
SciShow

Our Solar System Might Have TWO Hidden Planets

12th - Higher Ed
After Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet in 2006, our solar system went from having nine planets to eight. But about a decade later, some astronomers proposed there was another planet, larger than Earth, hiding in the Kuiper Belt. And in...
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Instructional Video6:44
SciShow

Why So Many Ladybugs Don't Look Like Ladybugs

12th - Higher Ed
Ladybugs are red with black spots, right? Well, not always. There's a lot of genetic and evolutionary reasons that they can be different colors with wacky patterns.
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Instructional Video5:38
SciShow

This Squid Glows… To Make Itself Invisible

12th - Higher Ed
When you live in the ocean, it can be hard to find ways to keep hidden from predators, or from your own prey. But these three animals have found clever ways to stay hidden, by using light to their advantage. One of them even /makes...
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Instructional Video2:36
MinuteEarth

Why Continents Are High

12th - Higher Ed
Lots of geological forces need to come together for continents to form, but they all require one ingredient: water.
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Instructional Video2:51
MinuteEarth

How Do Abortion Pills Work?

12th - Higher Ed
You may have heard of "abortion pills" - here's what these medications are and what they do (and don't do).
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Instructional Video2:41
MinuteEarth

What Happens When A Volcano Meets a Glacier?

12th - Higher Ed
Volcanoes might seem like an unstoppable force of nature - but there is at least one OTHER force on Earth that seems to be able to keep them down.